03.24.14
Document Freedom Day 2014 Imminent and ODF is Doing Very Well
Summary: It is becoming hard to deny that ODF is the one and only standard for exchange of editable documents
OpenDocument Format, or ODF, has been enjoying a renaissance of sorts. Registration has been open for Document Freedom Day 2014 [1] (in recent years this annual event was largely neglected), European politicians are now entertaining ODF [2-4], and here in the UK ODF is becoming a standard, perhaps the de facto standard in government (more on Microsoft’s response to it will be covered later this week). New software is now supporting ODF [5,6] and LibreOffice, which makes the press still [7,8], is replacing Microsoft Office in more and more places [9]. I happen to know about places that are quietly migrating to LibreOffice, without ever announcing it. Even Apple, which had helped Microsoft with OOXML (Apple is in Microsoft’s camp for a lot things), was pressured last week to move to ODF [10]. Wait and see how ODF changes the world and takes us into an era of sharing, collaboration, exchanges etc. that are truly independent from Microsoft’s monopoly. Prepare for a world where there are no “DOC” (or “DOCX”) files exchanged inside E-mails. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2014
Today registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2014 events. This year the campaign day is March 26th, when people who believe in fair access to communications technology and Open Standards will again present, perform, and demonstrate. Event organisers can now register on the re-launched documentfreedom.org website.
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Advocacy: “Governments should choose ODF”
Governments should choose the Open Document Format (ODF) as the default option for all editable government documents, says OpenForum Europe, an organisation advocating the use of open standards in ICT. “ODF has clear superiority in terms of independence from proprietary influence or dependency on proprietary technology.”
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Writing on his weblog, the FSFE President called on the EC to “run open, competitive calls for tender based on functional specifications rather than brand names — something it has refused to do for two decades.”
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MEP Tarand: “EU should switch to ODF standard”
The European institutions should switch to using the Open Document Format ODF as their internal default document format, says Member of the European Parliament Indrek Tarand. Speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament’s Free Software User Group (Epfsug), last week Wednesday, MEP Tarand said: “Moving to ODF would allow real innovation, and real procurement.”
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European Union in talks to move to the Open Document Format
A member of the European parliament, Indrek Tarand, openly favoured ODF at the European Parliament’s Free Software User Group (Epsfug) meeting. He is also the founder of the Free Software User Group. He said, “Our work is done the day the EU authorities switch to using the ODF standard. The European Parliament should also be able to use its own free software distribution.” It’s noteworthy to add that the adoption of ODF is normally followed by the adoption of the open source software.
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HoudiniEsq Adds Open Document Format Support
Innovator and leader in Legal Practice Management Software-as-a-Service for enterprise, LogicBit Software Corp. announced today that it has added support for the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument to its core product HoudiniEsq.
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WebODF Making Good Progress, Aims For More
WebODF is an AGPL-licensed JavaScript library that provides Open Document Format support on the web with collaborative editing capabilities. In the four years the project has been around, it’s been making great success but they have even more plans going forward.
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Freshly Stable
With the release of our new LibreOffice 4.2 version and the new website, people have noticed a small yet quite visual change in the way we label the versions of LibreOffice. You now have the choice between downloading LibreOffice “Fresh” or “Stable”.
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Zorin OS Cubed, “Fresh” LibreOffice, and Year of Linux
In today’s search was two Zorin OS reviews and a recommendation. The Document Foundation released the second update to the 4.2 branch of their popular office suite. Jamie Watson got a new Acer laptop and test drove several popular distributions on it. Computer Weekly online has published an article on Unix to Linux migrations and Simon Phipps put out a new post titled 2014 is the year of the Linux desktop.
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Breaking Microsoft’s Chains by Moving to LibreOffice
Vignoli is one of the founders and a member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice, where his duties include marketing and communications as well as being an international spokesperson for the project. Before helping start The Document Project, he spent over six years on the marketing team for OpenOffice.org, which was the original code base for LibreOffice. In other words, this is a guy who knows his stuff and who has “been there/done that” when it comes to large enterprise level migrations from MS Office to LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
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Open document standards will cure Apple’s bit rot
Reports emerged this week of a problem for Apple users opening presentation files created in Keynote. The latest update of Keynote — in fact, all of iWork ’13 — won’t open files created with versions before iWork ’09, instead prompting users to find a copy of iWork ’09 and open the file with that.
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